


"That life is not for you, not ever"

by Anarchyinplasma



Series: Life and Times of a Risen [8]
Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:47:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25430380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anarchyinplasma/pseuds/Anarchyinplasma
Summary: “It’s okay,” he summons an arrow again and twirls it on his fingers as he talks. “The reason you want to be a Guardian is the same reason I wouldn't ever wish it upon you. We do this so that no-one else has to, because no-one else can.”
Series: Life and Times of a Risen [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/643955
Kudos: 3





	"That life is not for you, not ever"

**Author's Note:**

> The AoT sparrow lore gave birth to this, I like it as a character moment.

Since the Red War had devastated the sector of the City known informally as the Guardian’s quarter, Arcturus and a multitude of others were sleeping rough, he’d heard a lot of the Warlocks complaining about it, mostly the ones in research. He was used to it himself thankfully, the work of a Nightstalker did not lend itself to single-day trips.

Still, the amount of equipment needed to rebuild multiple high-rises didn’t leave a lot of space for sleeping rough in the ruins of his old home, and the aging Hunter found himself unwilling to take multiple back to back long-haul scavenging missions, he didn’t need that much time to himself. So after much deliberation and being banned from simply leaving his ship in the main hanger and turning that into his living space, he eventually made his way to a quiet, derelict part of the city and settled down with his sparrow and his guns.

The spot he picked was in a blasted and ruined Tex Mechanica factory on the edge of the manufacturing zone, not a long way from the more civilised streets, but far enough that he could have his peace and quiet. He set up a semi-permanent fire pit then set about scavenging some parts from the number of workstations around him to rebuild one in its entirety, then spent his time making some mods for his armour, his sparrow, and his steel.

Three weeks after he’s moved in, set up his hammock and kettle and everything else he really really needs, a clatter alerts him to intruders.

He follows his instincts like he would in the wild, douse the fire, grab his gear, hunt from the shadows. Quickly and quietly he reaches up, grabs the foreman’s gantry, and pulls himself up onto the catwalk; once there he softly shimmies his way up a support strut and onto the third level, and then crouches on the railing, eyes trained on the sound and a hand loosely holding onto his knife in as he prepares to drop from the rafters and kill like a Nightstalker does.

A pair of small figures run in, laughing gaily as they sprint around piles of rust and ruined chunks of metal, Arcturus’ eyes relax and his knife goes back into his vambrace, dropping silently to the catwalks and following their progress as they run around the factory play fighting imaginary enemies, pretending to be heroic guardians like Saint-14 and Cayde, winning battles of legend against insurmountable odds and being hailed as saviours. He keeps to the shadows as they play, not wishing to interrupt their childish revelry and making sure that none of the ruined factory roof will suddenly cave in on them.

He drops to the floor as they run back to the front of the factory and takes up his seat as he re-lights his fire, unable to hide the smirk as they round the corner in the middle of an argument.  
“Nuh uh, Titans are the bestest! Hunters ar-” the little girl stops dead, seeing him slouching on his whisper-quiet hovering sparrow next to the fire with his eyebrows raised.  
“No really, go on, Hunters are what?” Arcturus asks, maintaining what he hopes is a stern look for all of two seconds before he grins and waves them over to two of the other chairs that surround his space.

“What are you two doing out here?” he asks as they sit down, jaws slack in awe.  
“Fighting the Darkness!” the girl says, bolder than her companion, who sits there with her little eyes cautiously watching the Risen’s every move.  
“I see” he says, amused, “you want to be Guardians?”  
“Yeah!” they both nod enthusiastically, and Arcturus smiles at their infectious enthusiasm, though the quirk of his lips is tinged with sadness.  
“Do your parents know you’re playing out here?” he asks, changing the subject, to his surprise they nod.  
“Momma told us to just be careful, and not to go too far into the ruins.” Arcturus nods.  
“Fair enough, I would listen to her.” he tells them. “It can be dangerous out here, the buildings aren’t all that stable.” he adds sternly, trying to impress on them the severity of his warning.  
“Ok mister” they reply, looking a little dejected.  
“Why are you two even out here, don’t tell me there isn’t a park somewhere close by.” Arcturus asks, genuinely curious, there should be one, Zavala liked to advocate a fair amount of budget to civilian welfare and there were parks everywhere.  
“It got exploded” is the somewhat childish response he gets.  
“Tell you what then” Arcturus finds himself saying, before he can really think about why; “I’ll clean up a bit of this place so it’s safe, and you guys can even bring your friends and parents over so you have a safe place to play.”

And so Arcturus finds himself with a task he doesn’t fully know why he took up.

It’s decent work he supposes, and it keeps him busy while he’s waiting for the infrastructure to come back online so that he can be pulled out of standby and sent on priority ops again. A few members of NRFOE even end up helping him out when they drop by, and between Stratos, Rydiah and himself, they’ve cleaned up and made safe most of the factory by day’s end. He bids them farewell with a smile, then heads to sleep.

The next day Arcturus is tuning his rifle when a group of five walk gingerly into his abode. He takes stock of his guests as they fully enter the door, there are the two girls from yesterday, a young boy with a prosthetic arm, what he thinks should be the girl’s mother, and a girl in her mid teens who based on her looks he judges as probably an older sister to the two younger girls.  
“Hi Mister!” the bolder of the girls waves happily, Arcturus grins and waves back with one hand as he slots the March back together and stows his more delicate gear.

“Hello?” the woman asks, “my girls here were telling me they met you here yesterday?”  
“Yes they stumbled into me when they ran in” he tells her, shaking her hand. “I thought I’d clean it up so they don’t end up running around somewhere unsafe.”  
“How kind” she says, and Arcturus gestures to the seats he has set up and the kettle on the boil over his open fire.  
“Would you like a seat and some tea? I’m sure you might have some questions for me.” the woman nods thankfully and she and her eldest daughter take a seat as Arcturus briefly addresses the three younger kids.  
“It’s not safe anywhere but this factory, but in here there shouldn’t be anything dangerous, so have fun but remember everything your mother told you about being safe.” They give him enthusiastic nods and run off as Arcturus returns to his fire and prepares everyone a cup of tea.

“I didn’t really believe they’d met a Guardian.” the teenager says as she accepts the cup, and Arcturus smiles.  
“Can’t fault you on that, although I’m not a Guardian strictly speaking, and I wouldn’t be here except I haven’t got a house right now.” she nods and takes a sip as her mother opens her mouth to talk.  
“So who are you?” She asks him. “If you’re not a Guardian, that is.” She gestures to his battlescarred and worn gear, especially his cloak. “You look like a Hunter.”  
“I am a Hunter,” Arcturus takes a sip of tea, “but I’m a Risen, little older than a Guardian.”

The teenager’s face is painted with such a surprised look that Arcturus can’t help a snicker.  
“I’m seven hundred and seventy five.” he tells her, his mirth growing as both she and her mother’s mouths fall open in shock.  
“You… Uh…You don’t look it.” the teen stutters. Arcturus’ grin widens, and with the ice broken, the three of them relax into easy enough conversation for an hour or so until the group leaves for the night.

They become semi-regular guests, most often accompanied by the elder sister, whom Arcturus will treat to a cup of tea while her younger siblings play and tell stories about all the things he’s seen and done.  
“What about your gun?” she asks him one day; and before he knows it the Hunter is giving both her and her younger siblings a weapons demonstration and a lecture on firearms safety that he hopes to every power in the universe they heed.

They come back the next day and while the younger siblings are brimming with energy and run off to trounce the forces of Darkness with vigour, the eldest seems strangely subdued.  
“Something wrong?” Arcturus asks her as he pours tea, overwhelmingly self-conscious of the fact he’s not qualified to be a psychiatrist to someone less than a tenth his age. But the answer he gets isn’t what he expects, and he finds, sadly, that he can relate rather more than he’d like.  
“They all want to be Guardians, you’ve inspired them.”  
“Ah” Arcturus murmurs, feeling the weight of his guilt crash down on his shoulders like a tidal wave of ice-water.  
“I want them to have as much fun as you seem to” she says, surprising him, “but when you become a Guardian…”  
“Yeah,” Arcturus sighs heavily into his mug, “yeah, I know, Shin proved you don’t need to die to get the light, but death…” he pauses, thinking about the best way to phrase it, “it becomes an afterthought, I’ve died more times than I can count, and it’s not like you don’t feel it.” He shrugs, defeated by the thought. “I don’t know what I can do about that, they want to hear tales of glory, and those things keep morale up, they’re too young, too innocent to tell them about reality.”

The teenager shrugs.  
“What is reality like?” she asks, genuinely curious. Arcturus gives a leaden sigh.  
“It’s lonely” he answers, honestly, “I’ve watched so much just slip by, and granted I’m cynical, Nightstalker and all, I’ve spent more time than most in the wilds, but my days are filled with lonely sadness; it’s a large part of why I’m a Nightstalker, actually.” He pulls on his light and from his fingers spins an arrow cut from creation’s shadow. The ribbon of amethyst spins while he talks.

“If you touch the Void, you make it a part of you, especially for Hunters, we’re sort of… special, like that, we’re not really into doing things halfway.” He clenches the arrow in his fist and pulls the energy back inside, feeling his Void curl up in his veins and coil cold, comforting talons around his heart.  
“That was pretty” the teen tells him and Arcturus raises an eyebrow.  
“You think my light is pretty? This is the Void, it’s the shadow of creation and as close to Darkness as you can get in light.”  
“It’s still pretty” is the response he gets, slightly admonished.  
“I suppose” he grants, holding out his hand and letting a spectral blade materialise, all sleek edges and perfect balance.

Three small pairs of feet run up to them and he pulls the light back in, turning to them with a somewhat hollow smile.  
“Can we see that again?” asks the boy, and Arcturus considers for a moment before he stands and summons his dusk bow.

A chorus of oooh’s and ahhh’s surround him, and in a moment of childish naivete the young girl who is normally the shyest reaches out to touch it.

Arcturus shadesteps as soon as her hand moves; pulling his bow out of reality and back into his heart as he does.  
“Not a good idea.” He says in a low voice, and the girl jerks her hand back as if burned. “It’s okay,” he reassures her, “you just can’t touch, you can’t ever touch someone else’s light.”  
“Why not?” asks the eldest sister, genuinely curious despite her younger sibling’s faux pas, and Arcturus suddenly has an idea. He pulls an arrow out again and shows them all what it looks like up close, a swirling spiraling double-helix ribbon of amethyst swimming with particles and light that tapers to a point at one end and has three helical fletchings on the other. Then he pulls it back inside.  
“My light is my soul” he tells them, trying to project as much gravitas into the words as he can, “to touch my light like that is tantamount to touching my soul, and it would pull the void into you as it is in me.”  
“We could be Guardians?!” the bold girl says, springing up with joy, Arcturus shakes his head.  
“You’d need my Ghost to use my light, and for that to happen we would both need to die.” he could perhaps have said it less bluntly, but this gets the point across.

“Oh…” the girl mumbles; Arcturus gives her a more genuine smile.  
“It’s okay,” he summons an arrow again and twirls it on his fingers as he talks. “The reason you want to be a Guardian is the same reason I wouldn't ever wish it upon you. We do this so that no-one else has to, because no-one else can.” He gives them a smile and pulls his cannon from his hip, unloading First Curse before offering it to the little girl who he thinks wants to be a Hunter.

“Do you remember everything I told you the other day?” he asks her as her tiny hand slides gingerly around the handle.  
“Don’t point it at anyone and never touch the trigger” she dutifully recites, and Arcturus relaxes his grip.  
“That gun,” he tells her, slowly, “is almost a hundred times older than you, it’s as old as me. Do you understand that?” the little girl nods. “This gun has been everywhere in this system, and it has seen more than most Guardians risen in the last century.” Arcturus sighs and shows her a long scar that runs the length of the otherwise immaculate top rail. “My point is that everything has a story. This gun, me, my light, and all of you.” He gestures to the group of three. “My story ended, a long time ago, and as with every Guardian, my responsibility now is to make sure that all of you get to see yours all the way to the happy ending.” The arrow he’s been twirling in his offhand the entire time flickers as he pulls the light back in and accepts his gun back.

The subject changes to another weapons demonstration after that, Arcturus shows them his new long rifle, and regales them with the story of the martian lab he dug it out of, a telling that he thought even master story-teller Cayde would have been proud of. He draws the line at letting any of them fire it however; he does not need that level of stress today.


End file.
